#rC3 - What the cyberoptimists got wrong - and what to do about it

rc3 preroll music

Herald: All right, our next talk is Cory
Doctorow, who I think needs very little

introduction in this situation. But for
those who don't know him: he's an

activist, he's a science fiction
author, and I think he can be

described as the King of Bloggers.
I remember him appearing on XKCD

with a cape back in the good old days.
So, Cory, please take it away.

Cory Doctorow: I don't know how I
feel about being a king, given

given that I'm wearing a guillotine badge.

Perhaps, like, party secretary.

You have my permission to take my picture.

So I'm going to I'm going to talk today
about technology and optimism

and where it comes from
and where it needs to go.

And I want to start by…

well, I want to start by putting
on my slides. So let's do that.

I want to start by busting a myth,
the myth of the blind techno optimist.

You've probably encountered the story,
the story that, you know, once upon a time,

there were a bunch o' nerds
who had discovered the Internet,

and thought that if we just gave everyone
the Internet, everything would be fine.

And that the only thing
that they needed to work on

was making sure everyone got connected
and everything else would

take care of itself. And now those idiots
have led us into this crazy, terrible,

dystopian world. And why didn't they
foresee all this trouble? And the way that

you know that this blind technological
optimism is a myth is that people don't go

out and start organizations like the
Electronic Frontier Foundation because

they think that everything is going to be
fine in the end. You know, if there's a

motto that characterizes those early
technological optimists, it's not that

everything is going to be great. It's that
everything will be great if we don't screw

it up. And if we do screw it up, it's
going to be really, really terrible. Now,

before computing was the source of regular
stock bubbles, it was just a passion. It

was driven not by dreams of riches, but by
programmers who are able to make stuff

happen. If you think about what the the
journey of a programmer is, it's that

first you figure out how to express your
will with sufficient precision that your

computer then enacts your will,
and enacts it tirelessly, perfectly…

[stream lost]

…computer is connected to a network, you

can project your will around the world.
You can take the thing

that you've built, this self executing
recipe, and you can give it to

someone else, and they can execute it as
well. It's, and… But it's better than a

recipe, right? You might have a recipe for
your grandmother's brownies. And when you

send it to someone else, they still have
to follow the recipe. But a program is

like a self executing recipe. It's like a
machine that just makes your grandmother's

brownies appear in every household in the
world if they just download your code and

run it. And of course, as you get on the
network and you find these people to share

your code with, you're finding the people
as well. You're finding community…

[stream lost]

chimes

Herald 2: But, well…

chimes

But not in, yeah,
that large scale, to be honest.

Tried around quite a few things,
and had a little

little online session for the Towel Day
and for all these things. We had the

Easterhegg, the DiVOC, and yeah. We're
working on it to get the connection back.

So, yeah.

CD: …giant, fat, phonebook-sized…

H2: OK, I can hear the voice
CD: …bill that they would get

every month for all the things
that they did, and so they they

they ran this whole system in the shadows.
And the last thing they wanted was for

for what they were doing to come to
the attention of their bosses.

And so they had a whole bunch of rules
about what you could and couldn't create.

They especially didn't want any sex,
and they didn't want anyone

explaining how to make bombs on Usenet.
And so there would be votes about

what news, new newsgroup could be created.

But every now & again, the backbone cabal,
which is what they called themselves…

H2: So we do have a sound
of Mr. Doctorow here

So I think it shouldn't, shouldn't
be too much of a of time until we get the

stream back.
CD: …about cooking should go under the

talk hierarchy, and
not under the rec hierarchy.

And John Gilmore and other people who
were in his company decided to set up

their own alternative version of Usenet
called the alt. hierarchy specifically

to allow for a discussion of cooking
wherever the hell they wanted it.

To exercise that little quantum of
self-determination. And very quickly,

the alt. hierarchy grew until it was
larger than all of Usenet put together.

So the worst nightmares of those early
digital activists have come to pass.

We have total penetration of technology.

There is centralization, surveillance, and
manipulation of all of our technology,

everywhere. And the question that I think
is a valid one to ask is how were we dealt

such a stinging defeat? How did it come to
pass that people who foresaw this danger,

and worked to make things great and not
screw them up, still arrived at this

moment where the Internet consists of five
giant websites filled with screenshots of

text from the other four. That's a phrase
from Tom Eastman, a software developer

in in New Zealand. And this is where I get
to my thesis about about what's just

happened and what needs to happen next,
because there is a story about

technologists that says that the blind
spot was dystopia, that technologists just

failed to understand that all of this
stuff could go horribly wrong.

And they really understood how
–whoops–

They really understood
how wrong it could go. The

The thing that technologists failed to
understand was the relationship of

monopolism to technology and the economy
as it was emerging in the early days of

the technology revolution. So if you think
about the early days of the commercial

Internet and commercial technology,
personal computing and so on, it was very

dynamic. Companies that were giants one
day ended up being acquired by upstarts

the next day. And that dynamism was not
driven solely by technology, but also by

US antitrust or anti-monopoly enforcers.
So I want you to think about what the

experience of a kid in the United States
in the 1980s would have been like if

you were using technology. So you might
have gotten your Apple II+ in say, 1980 or

1981. In 1982 the modem that came with it
could suddenly dial all kinds of services

all around America at a fraction of the
cost that it used to run that because AT&T

had been broken up, and long distance
charges fell through the floor. And then

in 1984, you might have replaced that
Apple II+ with an IBM PC, but it's more

likely that you might have replaced it
with an IBM PC clone. Whichever one you

replaced it with, it was probably running
an operating system from this guy, the guy

who wrote this letter. Bill Gates. The guy
who started this tiny little company

called Microsoft. And the reason that the
IBM PC was running code from this little

startup and not from IBM itself was not
because IBM didn't know how to write code.

IBM was really good at writing code. They
were arguably too good at writing code.

And for 12 years prior to the creation of
the PC, IBM had been in antitrust hell

with the Department of Justice in which
they were sued and sued and sued. And

every year of that 12 year lawsuit, IBM
spent more on its lawyers than the entire

US Department of Justice spent on all the
lawyers pursuing all antitrust action. And

one of the things that the Department of
Justice was really adamant about was that

if you made hardware, you shouldn't try to
monopolize the software for it. And so

even though eventually IBM prevailed–the
case was dropped against it–the last thing

they wanted was to get in trouble with the
DOJ again. And so after this 12 year

process, when they made their first PC,
they decided not to try and make the

operating system for it. Instead, they
tapped Bill Gates to make an operating

system for it. And then Tom Jennings, the
guy who created FidoNet, which was the

biggest competitor we had to Usenet. It
was a non-Internet-based distributed

message board system. Tom Jennings, who is
a virtuoso hardware engineer who lives a

few kilometers from my home here in Los
Angeles, he was tapped by a company called

Phoenix that asked him to reverse engineer
IBM's ROMs, and he reverse engineered the

PC ROM, produced a specification that was
used as the basis for a new clone ROM, and

that clone ROM was sold to PC vendors all
over the world. And it's how we got

Gateway, Dell, Compaq and all of the other
PC vendors that might have sold you that

IBM PC clone in 1984 running an operating
system that IBM hadn't made, on phone

lines that had been broken up from AT&T.
And then in 1992, you might have noticed

that that little company, Microsoft, had
grown to be a monopolist itself with 95%

of the operating system market. And so in
came the Department of Justice, and the

Department of Justice spent the next 7
years dragging Microsoft up and down that

same gravel road that they had dragged IBM
up and down for 12 years. And even though

Microsoft got away, the way IBM had, their
behavior was tamed, too, because when a

couple of guys in a Stanford lab, Larry
and Sergei, named their new search engine

after the largest number they could think
of, a one followed by 100 zeros, a google,

Microsoft decided not to do to them what
they had done to Netscape because they had

seen what the Department of Justice does
to you if you do that to your nascent

competitors. And so it felt in those days
like maybe we'd found some kind of perfect

market, a market where you could make your
products with low capital, just with the

sweat of your own mind, by writing code.
That you could access the global audience

of everyone who might want to run that
code over a low cost universal network.

And that that audience could switch to
your product at a very low cost, because

you could always write the code that it
would take to to port the old data formats

and to connect the old services to your
new product. It was a market where the

best ideas would turn into companies that
would find customers and change the world.

But what we didn't realize, what we were
naive about in those halcyon days of the

early Internet, was that antimonopoly law,
the antimonopoly law that had made things

so robust and dynamic that had given
everyone who who had access to a computer

a chance to try and make a dent in the
universe, that that antitrust law had been

shot in the guts in 1982, and was bleeding
out. And it's all thanks to this guy,

Robert Bork. Robert Bork is kind of an
obscure figure for for most people these

days. Although I said that on Twitter the
other day and a bunch of people in their

50s said, "Oh, I know who Robert Bork
is." But I think if you're not an American

in your 50s or a certain kind of weirdo
conservative activist, you've probably

never heard of this guy. Robert Bork was
Richard Nixon's solicitor general and he

committed crimes for Richard Nixon. And
they were so egregious that when Ronald

Reagan tried to appoint him to the US
Supreme Court, the Senate decided not to

confirm him because he was too grimy for
the US Supreme Court. And so instead, he

became a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald
Reagan and he created a new theory about

when monopoly laws should be enforced, a
theory he called the consumer harm theory.

The consumer harm theory says that we
don't hate monopolies because monopolies

are bad. We only hate monopolies because
they sometimes raise prices, and so long

as a company that has a monopoly isn't
immediately raising prices after they

acquire that monopoly, it's OK to let the
monopoly form and to let the monopoly

fester. And this idea was incredibly
popular, and not just with Ronald Reagan.

Every one of the neoliberal leaders of the
Reagan era, from Helmut Kohl to Margaret

Thatcher to Brian Mulroney to Augusto
Pinochet, took up the ideas of Robert Bork

and said that, from now on, we are not
going to get rid of our monopolies. From

now on, we're going to encourage the
growth of monopolies on the grounds that

they are efficient and only shut them down
if we can prove that they've used their

monopoly to raise prices. Now, this idea
is a stupid idea, but it's incredibly

popular for rich people, because rich
people like the idea that they could buy

shares in companies that could establish
monopolies. And those rich people funded

Robert Bork. They created, among
other things, a series of junkets called

The Manne Seminars. M-A-N-N-E

The Manne seminars are continuing
educational seminars for US

federal judges in Florida, where you fly
to Florida, stay in a luxury hotel, and

get lectured on the brilliance of Robert
Bork. 40% of US federal judges have been

through the Manne seminars.
Unsurprisingly, those judges are far less

likely to punish monopolistic conduct. The
people who like Robert Bork funded law

schools and economics departments and
journals. And they they turned the idea of

consumer harm into a kind of global
doctrine that has now taken over every

single regulator in the West. China has a
slightly different vision of it, as does

Russia. But the European Union, Canada,
the US, most of Central and South America

have all adopted these rules. I don't know
to what extent these rules have penetrated

the African markets. And so, and and and
consumer harm, this idea that monopolies

should only be shut down if you can show
that they're using monopolism to raise

prices, is incredibly hard to prove. In
fact, you could basically call it

impossible to prove. And as a result,
anti-competitive conduct became so

routine, that we no longer think of it as
unusual. Until the Bork era, here are some

of the things that were considered
violations of antitrust law and that would

have attracted scrutiny from a regulator:
merging with a major competitor, acquiring

a small competitor, or creating a vertical
monopoly where you own different parts of

the supply chain, like Google buying an ad
tech company. Now, the story of how tech

got monopolized leans hard not on Robert
Bork, but on all these exotic ideas like

network effects. The idea that if you if
you have one fax machine, it's useless and

two are very useful and three are twice as
useful and four is twice as useful again,

and that once a tech company starts to
become successful, the network effects

snowball and you will never dethrone it.
Despite the fact that we no longer have

Friendster or AltaVista or Amigas or any
of these other potential purveyors of

network effects. A close look at how tech
companies grew does not show that network

effects is what led to that growth.
Instead, you see predatory conduct.

Moneyball. Using access to the capital
markets to raise gigantic amounts of money

and buy or merge with all of your
competitors as the means by which they

grew. And as an example of this, I want
you to think about Google for a minute. So

Google is a company that has made exactly
one and a half successful in-house

products. They made a really good search
engine and a pretty good Hotmail clone.

Everything else that they've made in-house
died. This is just a small sample of the

Google product graveyard. And everything
that they've done that's

successful–Android, ad tech, YouTube, and
so on–all of these are companies that they

acquired from someone else. So this is not
a company that has a natural monopoly due

to a network effect. This is a company
that has an unnatural monopoly due to

predatory conduct. Now, network effects
are indeed real. They are a thing. And you

can see them exemplified pretty well with
the Bell System. This was what we called

AT&T in the US before it was broken up in
the 1980's. But with with net with tech,

network effects are very different from
other kinds of industries. You think of

the railroad industry where once you have
rails that run from one place to another,

it doesn't make any sense to to put in a
second set of rails. And so the custom

accrues to the rail vendor, which can add
more rails to more destinations. And

before long, you have these natural
monopolies emerging in rail. But that's

not how it works with technology. And the
reason is that technology has

interoperability. So built into our
general purpose computers and our general

purpose network is the ability to run any
program provided you can express it in

symbolic logic and to interface any new
network service with any existing network

service. Now, oftentimes that
interoperability is deliberate and

engineered. Someone will go to a standards
body like the W3C and decide on what an

HTTP header looks like. But just as often,
that interoperability is adversarial. That

interoperability is a form of competitive
compatibility, where a new company makes a

product that plugs into an existing
product or service without permission,

against the wishes of the people who made
the existing product or service. Like Tom

Jennings making his IBM PC ROMs. And what
happens then is that the walled garden of

the company that came before becomes a
feedlot in which all of the customers have

been handily penned in, so that the new
market entrant can go over and choose

whichever ones they want and devour them
in a smorgasbord. So to think about how

this worked with the Bell System, the Bell
System originally had not just a monopoly

over the wires, but a monopoly over the
things that connected to the wires. It was

against the law to connect a phone, or a
phone-like device, or even a thing that

clicked on to a phone, to a phone that
came from the Bell System or to a jack

that the Bell System had installed. And
they argued that because they were a

monopolist, they were part of America's
national security and safety apparatus,

and that allowing third parties to connect
things to their network would result in

the network being made unreliable and
therefore America being made insecure and

unsafe. But they didn't use this power
just to keep the network operational. They

used this power to extract monopoly rents,
to make money by screwing over their

customers, by preventing new market
entrants. So, for example, to see where

how bad this got, you can look at where it
broke down. The first time that this

system broke down was when AT&T sued a
competitor called Hush-A-Phone.

And Hush-A-Phone was a plastic cup that
snapped over the mouthpiece of your Bell

phone so that, when you were speaking,
your voice would be muffled, and people

who are in the same room as you would find
it hard to listen in on your conversation.

And AT&T argued that the Hush-A-Phone,
because it was mechanically coupled to the

Bell System, endangered the integrity of
the Bell System. And their regulator told

them to go pound sand. They said, no, this
doesn't endanger the system, get used to

it, people can connect things to their
phones. And that's when they lost

mechanical coupling prohibitions. And then
they went after another company called

Carterfone. And Carterfone made a walkie
talkie that plugged into a regular RJ11

jack that you could connect your phone to.
And it was for people who worked on

ranches and farms so that they could they
could clip a walkie talkie onto their belt

and go out and work in the barn or ride
out on the range, and still take their

phone calls. And AT&T argued that by
electrically coupling devices to the Bell

System that they were violating AT&T's
monopoly and endangering America. And

again, their regulator told them that that
was not a valid reason, and they lost the

ability to block electrical electrical
coupling. And this is where we see the

growth of everything from modems to
answering machines and all of the other

devices that eventually plugged into the
Bell System. So interoperability can turn

network effects on their head. And
interoperability was really key to the

growth of the tech monopolists today.

So think about the iWork suite
and its history

Before the iWork suite came about,
Apple was in really serious trouble

in enterprise networks. If you ran a
business, chances are most of the

computers in your network were PCs, but
maybe the designer or an executive who had

the right to decide what kind of computer
they would use was would be running a Mac.

And the way that that Microsoft punished
you for running that Macintosh in the

Microsoft environment was by dragging
their heels on updating the Microsoft

Office suite for the Mac. And so Macs
became this kind of cursed zone, where if

someone were to send a Word file or an
Excel file to a Mac, and that file was

then opened and saved again, it would
never be openable again on any computer

anywhere in the world. It would be
irretrievably corrupted. And Bill Gates

did not fix this because Steve Jobs went
to him and asked him pretty please to make

a better Microsoft Office suite for the
Mac. Instead, Steve Jobs got a bunch of

engineers to reverse engineer the the file
formats. And then they produced iWork,

whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are used
to read and write Office files perfectly.

And very quickly, they were able to
colonize the Microsoft Office environment,

running ads like the Switch ads, where
they said, well, you may have hesitated to

give up your Windows PC because all of
your files are stuck in there.

But what if I told you that you could
read and write all the files ever

created with a Windows system,
and you could do it from a Mac

by running one piece of competitive
compatibility software, of software

that was adversarially interoperable
with the Microsoft ecosystem?

And that is what rescued the Mac
from the scrap heap of history.

And it wasn't just software, it
was also hardware. In the early 1990's

Lexmark was the–or rather the
late 1990s–Lexmark was the printer

division of IBM, the not very well
reformed monopolist, and Lexmark used

little microchips to stop people from
refilling their laser toner cartridges.

And a company called Static Controls, a
little Taiwanese company, reverse

engineered that microchip. It only held a
12 byte program, so it wasn't hard.

And they made new chips that would allow
you to refill your cartridge. Lexmark lost

their lawsuit against Static Controls. And
so now Static Controls had this huge

installed user base of people who are
desperate for cheap toner cartridges. And

instead of having a network advantage,
Lexmark now had a network disadvantage.

Today, Lexmark is a division of the
company that owns Static Controls.

And it's not, of course, hardware also. It's
also network services. When Facebook first

got off the ground, Mark Zuckerberg had a
really serious problem, which is that

everyone who wanted to use social media
already was on the dominant social media

platform, a company called MySpace that
was owned by the world's most rapacious,

vicious billionaire, Rupert Murdoch. And
again, Zuck did not go to Rupert and say,

please allow your users to talk to my
users because people want to use Facebook,

but they don't want to leave their friends
behind. Instead, what they did was they

made a bot and you give that bought your
login credentials, and it would go to

MySpace and scrape the waiting messages
that were there for you and put them in

your Facebook inbox,
and you could reply to them, and

it would pilot them back out to MySpace.

Now, all of this led to a very dynamic
system that completely changed the

way that we interacted with technology.
But all of this has gone the way of the

dodo. And the reason for that is that as
these companies acquired new monopolies,

they diverted their monopoly rents to
foreclosing on competitive compatibility.

So you may remember the urgent fight over
software patents. The growth of software

copyrights. The ongoing problem of anti-
circumvention rules that make it illegal

to break DRM, most recently seen in the
shutdown of youtube-dl.

Enforceable terms of service.

Facebook has just used its terms of
service to try and shut down

Ad Observatory, an academic project that
tracks Facebook's compliance with its own

policies on political paid disinformation.
And they've said that because this service

violates their terms of service, it's
illegal. Never mind that Facebook had to

violate MySpace's terms of service to gain
its ascendancy.

And then new rights that are purchased
with very expensive lawsuits.

So today we have the Google-Oracle lawsuit

going through the Supreme Court
in the United States. That might

create a new copyright over APIs. Now, all
of these things–patents, copyrights,

anti-circumvention, terms of service,
novel copyrights–they trade under the

name intellectual property. And if you're
familiar with the phrase intellectual

property, you'll know that free culture
activists hate this term. In fact, when

you ask them what we should call these
things…

Sorry, there's my software patents slide,
I knew I had one in there somewhere.

When you when you call it…

When you ask them what we should call
intellectual property, they say, oh, you

should call it the author's monopoly,
because that's what they called it in the

days of the Statute of Anne. That's what
they called it in the founding in the

United States, authors' monopolies. And
authors get really pissy when you say that

they have a monopoly. And they do for good
reason, because although formally the fact

that I wrote this speech and therefore I
have the monopoly over reading it to you

on my microphone means that I am a
monopolist, I don't have a market power

monopoly. Right? I can't use this monopoly
to extract monopoly rents from the

marketplace. Writers who go to the five
remaining publishers–soon to be four

if Bertelsmann buys out Simon and
Schuster–don't get to use the fact that

they have a monopoly to negotiate crazy
supermarket prices that go beyond what

what would happen in a competitive market.
Unlike, say, the the monopolists

themselves, the actual monopolists we have
who get to charge very high prices for

their services. And so it's it's not a bad
point that an author's monopoly is not a

monopoly in the way that we talk about it
when we talk about monopolism in the tech

sector. But IP does have a very precise
meaning, a meaning that is not…

has nothing to do with intellectualism or
property. IP in the sense of software

patents, copyrights, anti-circumvention,
terms of service, API copyrights, and so on

it has the precise meaning of any law
or rule that lets me decide who can

criticize me, who can compete with me, and
who and how my customers must behave

themselves. And when you fuse a market
power monopoly with an author's monopoly,

when you have a market power monopoly that
has IP behind it, you get something far

more durable than either a regular
monopoly or an author's monopoly,

a copyright monopoly. You get a monopoly
that the government will defend rather

than dismantling. So, for example, if you
have a monopoly that you can defend with a

patent, right, like today, you have HP
monopolizing it's ink cartridge market and

they have patents over the security chips
and their ink cartridges. The government

will seize compatible ink cartridges at
the border on your behalf for because they

violate your patents. And so instead of
punishing you for creating a monopoly, the

government will reward you by doing your
enforcement work for you. And not only

that, but once you have a monopoly
that's backed by some kinds of IP like

anti-circumvention, the government will
punish people who report defects in your

products. So if you have a monopoly over
printers or if you have a monopoly over

phones, and someone finds a defect that
allows third parties to install their own

ink or their own app stores, the
circumvention of your DRM becomes a crime

under Article 6 of the European Copyright
Directive, and under Section 1201 of the

Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and
under similar laws all around the world.

And the government will both fine and
potentially imprison the security

researchers who point out that your
products have a defect in them.

Now, I started this talk by saying that

early Internet boosters were not
blind to the perils of technology.

But some of them them were, a little.

After all, once all that
money started sloshing around,

then if you could convince yourself
that tech was an unforced

an unchecked force for good, then
you could also convince yourself

that getting all of that money
that the tech industry was generating

would make you on the side of good.

The myth of two guys in a garage
who could top a billion dollar giants

and become billionaires themselves,
fired a lot of techies' imaginations

and sidelined a lot of their conscience.

But those days are behind us,
thanks to monopolies.

Thanks to monopolies, founders
who want to start businesses that compete

with the monopolists, monopolists who have
double-digit growth every year, and who

realize tens, if not hundreds of billions
of dollars in profit collectively.

Those founders, when they go to a venture
capitalist or another funder, are told

that the funders aren't interested in
funding these direct competitors.

Funders call the lines of business that
big tech is in the kill zone, and they

understand that any attempt to fund a
business that operates in the kill zone

will result in your company being crushed

by the monopolistic power of
the entrenched company.

And so instead, if you are a
technologist headed to Silicon Valley,

you don't dream of changing the world. You
dream of like having a mini kitchen with

free kombucha and maybe getting massages
on Wednesday on the on behalf of the

company. And liberated from the fear of
losing customers to competitors, tech has

pivoted from liberating customers to
manipulating, locking in, and abusing

their users. And the code that does that
manipulation, that abuse and that lock-in?

It's all written by technologists.
Technologists who discovered their passion

for the field when they felt the thrill of
self-determination through writing code

and projecting it over networks. And this
is a really important fracture line.

I think this is a way to understand things
like the Googler Walkout and Tech Won't

Build It. No Tech for ICE. The solidarity
movements against facial recognition and

other surveillance technologies. That
technologists are no longer able to delude

themselves with the thrill of billions
into thinking that it's OK to do what

they've been doing. And one by one and in
increasing numbers, they're starting to

wake up to the fact that it's time to do
better. It's time to realize the

liberatory power of technology and step
back from the power of technology to

control us. That this will all be so great
if we don't screw it up and if we do screw

it up, it's going to be really, really
terrible. And there are precedents for

this. And unfortunately, the precedents
are pretty incomplete. So,

Robert Oppenheimer very famously was one
of the few people in the world who is both

brilliant enough at being a manager and
brilliant enough at being a nuclear

physicist that he could lead the creation
of the first nuclear bomb and the

Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in the
United States. And legendarily, as that

first nuclear bomb test went off, he
turned away from the mushroom cloud and

said, "I am become death destroyer of
worlds," and embarked on a lifelong

project to demilitarize the atom to to put
back in the bottle the genie that he had

made. And my hope is that we can arrive at
a world in which our Oppenheimers decide

to put down their tools before they make
their atom bombs instead of after. That,

that we are at this crossroads now where
not only are the harms so visible that

they're undeniable, but also that
rewards for building the digital

equivalent of these A-bombs have dwindled
from a star in technology's hall of fame

to a really well funded pension plan. And
surely that is not enough to sell out for.

So many of you listening today probably
read my novel Little Brother and its

sequel Homeland. I know that because I
often hear from you, especially at events

like CCC and DEFCON and at SchmooCon and
at THOTCON and so on. People come up to me

and they say, you know, I read your book
and I, I understood both how powerful

technology could be and how terrifying it
would be if that power was not harnessed

for the people and instead was harnessed
to oppress people. And it made me embark

on my career as a technologist, as a
security researcher, a human rights

activist, a cyber lawyer. And, you know,
that's the best thing in my life, really.

I mean, apart from my kid and my family.
The fact that there are people out there

who have devoted their lives to doing
something better because of something

I wrote, that's that's really important to
me. And frankly, you know, if my kid has

got a chance of growing up in a world that
doesn't make Orwell look like an optimist,

it's going to be in part
because of that stuff.

But I've written a new Little Brother book.

I wrote this book that came out
this year called Attack Surface.

And this is genuinely not an ad. You don't
have to read it. And in fact, if you're

watching this, you probably don't need to,
although you might enjoy it. Because this

is aimed at a different kind of
technologist. This is a story about the

kind of technologist who spends their
whole life kidding themselves that working

on systems of control and oppression are
not that big a deal, because if they

didn't do it, someone else would do it.
There's an endless supply of

Oppenheimers, and if I turn my back,
someone else will be there to to finish my

work. Who come to a realization, maybe
belated, that they've spent their whole

life building a dystopia that they don't
want to live in. And who redeem

themselves, who come back from the brink.
And the reason I wrote this story now is

because I really wanted to reach the
technologists who are waking up every day

and saying I fell in love with this stuff
because it liberated me. And I spend my

days figuring out how to take away the
future of people who might be liberated by

it themselves. And that's an urgent
message, because author's

monopolies–IP–are available to everyone
thanks to the Internet of Things,

thanks to our embedded systems.

I'm going to break here
and editorialize very briefly.

This is the slide I'm most proud of, not
not for any kind of intellectual heft, but

I'm really bad at the GIMP, and I think I
did a really good job. So I just want to,

if you're if you're looking away from your
screen, if you're like peeling vegetables

or something, spare a glance at this
slide. I'm very happy with this slide.

So the IoT means that every device in our
world has access to an author's monopoly,

has IP in it. And that governments will
enforce the strictures that the designers

and manufacturers of these devices put
into them by punishing people who try to

use competitive compatibility to undo
those strictures. And not only that, but

IoT devices are not merely smart as a
convenience to invoke the law.

They're also smart as a way to enforce the
manufacturer's desires, as a way to

control the the actions of users, of
competitors, and of critics. That

these devices have a kind of unblinking eye
that watches you whenever you use them.

And if it catches you
trying to do something

that might displease
the manufacturer's shareholders,

it can stop you,
and it can rat you out to the authorities.

And so, you know, speaking in my
professional capacity

as a dystopian science fiction writer,
this scares the shit out of me.

Now, that is all a kind of grim way to end.

And so I'm going to finish this off with a
couple of words on what gives me hope. And

this comes from my colleague James Boyle
at the Duke Center for the Public Domain.

And Jamie, when he talks about
the computer liberation movement,

he compares it to the ecology movement.

And before the term ecology was coined,
we didn't have a movement.

We just had a bunch of issues.
Some people cared about whales,

some people cared about owls,
some people cared about the ozone layer.

And maybe they thought that the people
who cared about another issue

were doing important work,
but it wasn't their work.

And they weren't really on the same side.
They weren't part of the same cause.

But the term ecology changed all of that.
The term ecology took a thousand issues

and turned it into one movement;
one movement that everyone had

each other's back on. Even if the reason
you were in the movement was owls,

you were there to fight the corner of the
people who cared about the ozone layer.

And you began to understand that these
were all facets of the same problem.

Well, today, monopolies have taken over

and destroyed the lives of people
in a million ways.

Right?

Whether you're a professional wrestling
fan, a beer drinker, a whiskey drinker,

an eyeglass-wearer, a plane-flyer-in,
someone who relies on energy or

financial services or whose money was
stolen by a company whose auditors were

one of the big four accounting firms.
Whether you are someone who is upset

because there's four movie studios left or
three record labels or because there's

only one movie theater left in the United
States… one movie theater chain of any

size left in the United States. Or whether
you're pissed off that you're not going to

get the vaccine, because in the US there's
only one company that makes glass bottles

of any size. All of these people don't
know it, but they're in the same side.

They're on the same fight. And that fight
is the fight against monopolies.

Now, people talk about big tech
as though they're super geniuses.

But when we rip off the mask,
we discover that

these are not titans who built monopolies
through their special genius.

They're just three
sociopaths in a trench coat.

They're just the latest version
of the kind of monopolist

that we have been fighting
since time immemorial,

since the Rockefellers,
since the Mellons,

since every monopolistic family that
tried to establish a dynasty

that would allow them to rule
as though they were kings

was broken up and relegated to just having
their names on a couple of buildings.

We know how to deal with these people,
and it's time that we dealt with them

for what they are, which is
just plain, old fashioned sociopaths

and not as super geniuses who
stand astride the world like colossi.

Thank you.

H: Thank, thank you. I think I'm back now.
All right, well, thanks for this talk. We

are basically out of time, so we're moving
the Q&A to the fireside chat, which will

happen in, I think, 20 minutes or so. And
then all the questions that have already

been asked for this talk
will also be answered then.

But Cory, I think we had a short
stream outage around minute 5.

CD: OK.

H: So if you know what you said at minute 5
CD: Oh that was the full frontal nudity!

CD: laughter
H: You can maybe try to,

H: try to recapitulate it.
CD: I don't know what I said…

CD: minute 5…
H: History of networks apparently.

Unfortunately, it was not visible for us.
So I don't know myself, but I think

H: it was the history of networks.
CD: Probably it was my story about, it

it might have been my story about the
alt. hierarchy. That's probably it.

And and if you if you go to
your favorite search engine,

whether it's like,
AltaVista or Ask Jeeves or Yahoo,

and type in:
alt.interoperability.adversarial

you'll find an article I wrote for
the Electronic Frontier Foundation

about the history of the alt. hierarchy.

So I think that's probably
what got cut out.

H: OK, wonderful. Thank you.

H: I think people know how to use Google.
CD: I think Lycos has also indexed it.

H: Yes. They'll try to they'll try to figure it out.

H: All right. Well, thank you very much.
CD: Thank you!

H: Good luck & see you soon
CD: I'll see you guys in the fireside chat.

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